Criminal Justice System

LAST YEAR, murders in Baltimore fell below 300 for the first time since the 1980s. Our city experienced the largest homicide reduction in the nation during the second half of 2000. Violent crime dropped by 15 percent compared to 1999. But for all our progress, justice often is slow and uncertain in Baltimore. Too many violent criminals are allowed to go free after they have been arrested. We are not yet effectively using community service and court-ordered drug treatment, with escalating sanctions for noncompliance, as a means to quickly address nonviolent crimes.

IT TOOK 27 years for justice to finally visit upon Michael Austin, who until yesterday was still in jail for a murder he may not have committed. But time hasn't embittered the sweetness of his victory. The fact that his conviction was overturned this week restores faith in our entire criminal justice system and reinforces the notion that fairness matters more than convenience or appearance when it comes to crime and punishment. It would have been easier, perhaps, to let Mr. Austin rot in prison, to deny the piles of evidence that he didn't do anything and the growing calls for justice from this community.

Religious opponents of the death penalty gathered at Lawyers Mall in Annapolis to urge legislators to pass a bill repealing capital punishment in Maryland this year, but the relatively small turnout reflected their slim hopes of extracting legislation from a committe in which they have yet to gain a majority. Catholic, Protestant and Jewish clergy spoke out against executions before a few dozen supporters, making heartfelt but by now familiar arguments in a debate that is a hardy perennial in Annapolis.

AFTER MORE THAN a year of controversy and bureaucratic haggling, Baltimore will streamline its ponderous criminal justice system next month. No one knows for sure what will happen. Or as John Henry Lewin, the effort's coordinator, puts it, "We are excited about getting this going. But we are apprehensive about whether it's going to work." This ambivalence is understandable. The city's creaky criminal justice system is grappling with monumental problems. After a much-publicized crisis a year and a half ago, the Circuit Court has reduced -- but not eliminated -- case backlogs so serious that murderers went free because their trials were delayed too long.

It is difficult to describe my feelings on reading about the horrific story years of violence and sexual abuse of Catholic school children at the hands of John Merzbacher ("Prepared to make their voices heard," April 29). That there could be any chance of Mr. Merzbacher being released back into the community is hard to imagine. I don't believe there is often much "justice" in our country's criminal justice system, but this has to be one of the most blatant examples of how the victims seem to bear the brunt of the crime and the perpetrators continue to be shown mercy and granted rights they should not have.

Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse by Steve Bogira. Alfred A. Knopf. 404 pages. $25. For fans of Law & Order, CSI and other crime dramas dominating prime time today, Steve Bogira offers the real thing: an inside view of one of the busiest criminal courthouses in America. His view isn't sanitized or hyped. It's a meticulously reported, nonfiction account of a year in the Cook County Criminal Courthouse in Chicago. At 404 pages, it's exhaustive and exhausting.

The conventional wisdom is that innocent men and women are hardly ever sent to prison in the United States. A subset of that legend is that in the rare cases when the criminal justice system miscarries, that system is self-correcting, freeing the wrongfully convicted expeditiously. For many, many decades, books about wrongful convictions have both created and reinforced the legend. Almost every book told the story of an isolated case. Almost all ended with the wrongfully convicted individual back in society.

Annapolis Summer Garden's season opener, "Chicago," gets just about everything so right that it would please the ghost of choreographer Bob Fosse, to whose memory debuting director and choreographer Taavon Gamble dedicates this production. The production's success is largely attributable to Gamble's smart sense of style, evident in the stark black background set and simple black costumes that enhance his dynamic choreography. Also evident in every scene is the meticulous care Gamble gives all aspects of this Kander and Ebb musical that reveals the corruption of 1920s Chicago's criminal justice system through its heroines, who are based on actual women reported on in Chicago newspapers.

After nearly three years of study prompted by public dismay with the criminal justice system, a commission has concluded that Maryland should not end parole for inmates as part of a move to a "truth-in-sentencing" approach.The commission is urging that judges impose stricter sentences in some cases and is proposing that more alternatives to prison be found for nonviolent offenders.It also will call on Gov. Parris N. Glendening to reconsider his blanket refusal to grant parole to inmates serving life sentences, saying such an approach does not take into account individual circumstances.

In several speeches, Sen. Barack Obama has used an easy, if imprecise, formulation to express his despair over the high incarceration rate of young black men. "I don't want to wake up four years from now and discover that we still have more young black men in prison than in college," he said at a rally last year, repeating, more or less, a line used frequently by critics of the criminal justice system. But it's not accurate. There are far more young black men in college (about 530,000, ages 18 to 24)